Where Indie Game Producers Come Out to Play

Annual IndieCade Convention Bucks a Video Game Trend

A scene from The Night Journey, a collaboration between the artist Bill Viola and the University of Southern California Game Innovation Lab.Credit
Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Digital distribution has been driving sales of independent video games for nearly a decade. But the rise of the indies can be traced in no small part to IndieCade, a quirky, artful gathering that attracts people from around the world to an event that’s known as the Sundance of games.

IndieCade, which will showcase over 120 games and is expected to draw 5,000 enthusiasts to Culver City, Calif., this week, features creations made by eager college kids with something to prove and youngish professionals disgruntled by the assembly-line anonymity that can come with working on big-budget productions. The event runs from Thursday through Sunday.

This year’s festival, the seventh IndieCade, includes a juried competition in a variety of genres like digital video games, art installations, tabletop games and games that involve physical play. Three dozen creations are vying for 10 Red Carpet Awards on Thursday night and three final awards on Sunday. Any of those could lead to a deal with a major studio.

IndieCade is the brainchild of Stephanie Barish, a former digital media producer. In 2005, after becoming convinced that the game industry had tilted too much toward blockbuster franchises, she began brainstorming with friends in her living room about how to correct the imbalance. After some smaller showcases, IndieCade really established itself in 2008 with 20 games in an art gallery in Bellevue, Wash.

A chance meeting with the mayor of Culver City led to a decision to move the festival there, and the event has grown quickly under Ms. Barish’s leadership. Before becoming IndieCade’s chief executive, she worked for Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and, as the creative director for the Shoah Visual History Foundation, she produced an interactive documentary narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Photo

That Dragon, Cancer, a game based on the experiences of a son of Ryan Green, one of the inventors, as he undergoes cancer treatment.Credit
Ryan Green and Josh Larson

Frank Lantz, the director of the Game Center at New York University, described Ms. Barish as a “quiet storm who can get along with everyone.” Mr. Lantz, who will speak about authenticity in game development at this year’s event, said that the university would offer, through IndieCade, a $25,000 scholarship to its master’s program in game design.

“We see ourselves as part of this larger cultural shift as games mature and grow and become a kind of richer cultural domain,” Mr. Lantz said.

While scholarships can be valuable, the essence of IndieCade isn’t simply about winning awards. At its best, the conference is a meeting of the minds, usually away from the heavy influence of the corporations that can hold sway at events like the Game Developers Conference or the Penny Arcade Expo.

Games at IndieCade are displayed at an airy firehouse or outside in tents, in the fashion of a street fair. The creators are often present to clarify their objectives for the uninitiated and to talk shop with other gamemakers.

IndieCade can also attract purveyors of other media, like the video artist Bill Viola, who once spoke during a presentation about The Night Journey, an experimental game about a mystic’s quest for enlightenment. His collaborator on that effort, Tracy Fullerton, is the director of the University of Southern California Game Innovation Lab.

“Bill made a comparison between the time when he and other artists began working in the then-emerging form of video and the way we are seeing games emerge as a form of art,” Ms. Fullerton said.

Along those lines, the longtime gamemaker Brenda Romero, who won IndieCade’s Vanguard Award in 2009, will present her PreConception, an experimental exercise that uses dice, canvas, pawns and a typewriter. PreConception, she said, “is the equivalent of an artist’s block of stone still untouched.” It plays, she added, “with the concept that if the rules don’t say you can’t do it, maybe you can.”

Photo

Stephanie Barish, the chief executive of IndieCade, which she founded as a response to blockbuster franchises.Credit
Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Ms. Romero said that the intimacy and relatively small size of IndieCade allowed for “long conversations about games that we would not normally discuss, like games about personal experience and the topics that move games forward, not just graphical advancements.”

The games Myst and Doom will be honored on their 20th anniversaries with panels and discussions. And the distinctive Night Games portion of IndieCade will feature The Hearst Collection, a real-life maze in which people who enter try to steal works of art without tripping laser alarms.

During the Night Games events, IndieCade’s “really cool” magic comes alive, said Steve Gaynor of the Fullbright Company, whose team made the popular Gone Home exploration mystery, one of this year’s contenders for a top prize. The evening events are focused on public play and audience participation.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

“Some are more like public performances, and they’re exciting things to see,” Mr. Gaynor said.

Unlike the often solitary experience of playing on a computer, he said, “games played out in the wild really feel alive.”

Among this year’s nominees for a top award is That Dragon, Cancer, a narrative-rich offering about parents dealing with their son’s illness. Ryan Green, a programmer and filmmaker whose son Joel has cancer, spent a good deal of his savings making the game. He said he hoped to convey what it is like to deal with the peaks and nadirs of cancer treatment.

“Joel had a lot of setbacks due to the treatment,” Mr. Green said. “So the player experiences those disabilities and often feels empathy.” That Dragon, Cancer, received financing from the makers of Ouya, the Android-based gaming console, and Mr. Green and a co-creator, Josh Larson, will travel to IndieCade to show a new level of the game.

While there will be much commiserating and occasional complaining among gamemakers, major publishers will be watching, attending and buying. Adam Boyes, a Sony vice president, noted that The Unfinished Swan, a popular fairy-tale-oriented game for the PlayStation Network, originated as a prototype at the first IndieCade.

“It has become more competitive than ever,” Mr. Boyes said. “We’ll be there ready to make deals on the spot.”

Correction: October 3, 2013

Because of an editing error, a picture caption on Wednesday with an article about the IndieCade video game festival in Culver City, Calif., misstated the name of a game that has been nominated for a top award in the festival’s competition. As the article correctly noted, it is That Dragon, Cancer — not Cancer, That Dragon.

A version of this article appears in print on October 2, 2013, on Page C7 of the New York edition with the headline: Where Indie Game Producers Come Out to Play. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe